Lindenhurst has been designed for two-way servers, Twin Castle for four-way machines. They will work with processors codenamed Nacona and Potomac, respectively. Both chipsets will support PCI Express, the next-generation PCI bus designed to replace PCI, PCI-X and AGP.

Intel will deliver in the middle of the year Nacona, a 64-bit Pentium 4 Xeon processor geared for two-way servers. Later in the year, it will release a 64-bit version of Prescott for high-end desktops and workstations using a single processor. Next year, Intel will release multiprocessor-capable version of its 64-bit Xeon.

Barrett went to lengths to demonstrate the Itanium line will continue to have a role, albeit primarily as a back-end processor for running applications such as large databases. His keynote included presentations from end users including Wall Street analysts Morgan Stanley saying they will use both 64-bit Xeon and Itanium systems.

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Compatibilidade com "3dnow"???

Intel executives were deliberately vague about the extent to which the new Intel extensions were compatible with the AMD extensions released in 2000. However, Intel did say its Nacona processor would also include enhancements to its multimedia instruction extensions, another area where AMD and Intel have diverging chip implementations.

"This is better than 3DNow," said Mike Fister, general manager of Intel's server group, referring to the AMD multimedia extensions in Athlon and Opteron.

“Brief examination of 64-bit Extension Technology Software Developer’s Guide shows that 64-bit extension technology from Intel is very identical to AMD64 technology in certain cases. Both technologies are based in the same general principles,” said an X-bit labs’ analyst Ilya Gavrichenkov.

“Compatibility with AMD 64 does not matter. What matters is compatibility with Microsoft’s operating system. Both Intel and AMD processors have unique micro-architectures so approaches may vary but both must work the OS,” an Intel’s spokesperson said.

“Intel, just like AMD, added a special CPU mode called “64-bit sub-mode”, where 64-bit flat linear addressing, 8 new general-purpose registers (GPRs), 8 new registers for streaming SIMD extensions (SSE, SSE2 and SSE3) and 64-bit-wide GPRs are available along with instruction pointers. Similar to AMD’s 64-bit chips, Intel’s 64-bit extension technology can run in either legacy IA32 mode or IA32e mode. IA-32e mode is the mode a processor uses when running a 64-bit operating system. The IA32e mode consists of two sub-modes: 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, just like it is implemented in AMD64 architecture,” X-bit labs’ analyst explains.

Intel’s officials distinctly claim that the 64-bit Extension Technology has been fully developed by Intel, even though Intel and AMD have cross-licensing agreement.